Electrifying highways, part III

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The last post discussed the highway part of the system.

But the system can't work unless the car is equipped to use the highway.  That's what this post will be about.  Equipping the car.

The highway will have a live wire in it which can be accessed with a device from the car traveling above it.  The car will find the groove that was engineered into the pavement and probe into that groove thus finding it, and thus be electrically connected to the wire or cable in the groove.  This electrical connection will power the car and charge the battery.

How will device find the groove?  How does Bluetooth work?  There are ways to do this with the electronics we have today.  The device will find the groove and deploy the probe into the groove and make the connection.  It will do this and meter itself so that the owner of the car can be billed for the electricity.  Not to worry, the equipment can be built that can do this.  If this weren't so, the automobile itself couldn't be manufactured.  Cars require a lot of robotic stuff in their manufacture and this could be no different.  Heck, Google wants to make a self driving car.  This probe only has to find a groove just a few inches away from it.  It can be done.

The device will be toward the rear of the car.  One concern that I had was that there could be damage if the car changed lanes or didn't stay centered in the lane.  You could build in some leeway in the device so that it won't be damaged.  But if a driver moved quickly out of position, it should be able to disconnect quickly and retract back into the car.  The battery power will take over from there.  Once the car gets back into proper position, it can reconnect to the power source.

Another concern is how much current in the cable?  It may overpower the car and melt down the components.  That may be a problem there that needs to be addressed.  The car may need some hardware that will address that issue, so that isn't a trivial problem.  For example, transformers are used to step down from a higher voltage to a lower voltage.  The voltage needed for a car may not be compatible with the voltage needed to transmit the electricity efficiently.

You can handle it similarly with how it is handled with homes.  A section of road will have its own set of transformers that will send the required amount of current to that section of road.  Each section of road would be like an address on a block.  That way, any car traveling on that road should be able to handle the current that flows into it, while driving through it, just as your appliances can handle the current coming from the grid.  The difference is that your car will be moving and so it changes addresses constantly.

I'll close this post with a little story from my childhood.  When I was a little kid, Dad bought us boys a Christmas present of "slot cars" that were a lot of fun.  The slots guided the little cars around a figure 8 track that had an intersection where the cars would crash into each other.

The slots in that little toy are like the slots mentioned here.  The track had slots built into them, and the car had little plastic probes that fit into the slots.  These slots guided the cars around the track.  The difference here is that the slots is where the electricity is coming from, which is a bit different from the toy.  A sophisticated device guides the car into the slot, which then provides the power to move the car.

The point is that the device should not be too difficult to understand.

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